The Hiding Place

by David Bell

  Janet Manning assured him it wasn’t.

  She opened the door for him seconds after he knocked. She was barefoot but otherwise still wearing the clothes she’d probably worked in. Her father wasn’t in the room, but Ashleigh was. The two of them sat on opposite ends of the couch, the TV playing one of those shows where they redecorate an entire home for fifty bucks or something like that. Janet turned it off, and Stynes sat in a chair, noting the empty wineglass on the end table by Janet’s arm.

  “Detective,” Janet said, “this house has just about exhausted its potential for hearing strange or disturbing news.”

  Stynes almost laughed. He looked at the two of them on the couch, the daughter a more petite version of the mother, but undeniably mother and child. He admired them, even liked them. Hell, if it weren’t for the complications surrounding the twenty-five-year-old murder of one of their close relatives, he’d really enjoy spending time with them.

  “Is your father home?” Stynes asked. “Would you like him to hear this?”

  “He’s here,” Janet said. “But why don’t you tell me what you know, and I’ll decide when to get him involved.”

  Stynes nodded. Fair enough.

  “We arrested a man today,” he said. “His identification said his name is Justin Manning.”

  The words settled over the room like an enveloping fog. No one moved or spoke. Stynes waited, watching the two Manning women. Ashleigh turned her head toward her mother as well, as though in anticipation.

  “Is it him?” Janet asked.

  The question-so simple, so loaded-cut to the heart of the entire matter.

  Is it him?

  “I’ll tell you what I do know,” Stynes said. He brought out his small notebook, flipped to the right page, and lifted his glasses so he could read the page. He knew some of the details without referencing the pad and spoke without directly referring to it. But it sometimes felt better to have the notebook there as a kind of prop. “This afternoon we received a call from St. Anne’s Elementary School. Are you familiar with it? It’s over on Roselawn Avenue.”

  “That’s where I went to school,” Janet said. “Grade school.”

  “They’re doing some summer cleaning projects, and one of their maintenance men found a man sleeping in the cafeteria. It looked like he was homeless and had been there for a couple of days, so they called the police.”

  “Did he break in?” Ashleigh asked.

  “Someone had left a service door open in the back, and he slipped in that way. When the officer arrived and asked for identification, the man produced an Ohio driver’s license saying he was Justin Manning of Columbus. The officer knew we were looking for this guy, so he brought him in.” Stynes reached into his jacket pocket again and brought out a photo. “First things first. Is this the man who came to your house in the middle of the night? And then this same man spoke to you on campus?” He handed the photo to Janet. “Take your time.”

  Janet looked at the photo and said, “Yes, that’s him.”

  She held on to the photo, her eyes studying it.

  “Ashleigh?” Stynes said. “Can you look too?”

  It took a long moment for Janet to hand the photo over, so long that Stynes had to speak.

  “Janet?”

  She passed it to Ashleigh without saying anything, and her daughter took the photo. Just as quickly, she said, “Yes, that’s the guy.”

  “And just to be clear, where did you see this man?”

  Ashleigh said, “He came to our porch and talked to Mom in the middle of the night.”

  Stynes took the photo back and returned it to his pocket.

  “What did he say?” Janet asked.

  “He hasn’t said much,” Stynes said. “In fact, he’s refused to answer any questions. He didn’t even ask for a lawyer. He handed over his identification and clammed up. We searched him and the small bag he carries with him. He didn’t carry any other identification. Nothing with the name Steven Kollman on it.”

  “He must have had something with that name on it,” Janet said. “How else would he be able to work and get a paycheck?”

  “Good question. And one we thought of. Turns out the place he was working, this Mi Casita or whatever it is, has a habit of paying some of its help under the table. They had some undocumented workers in the kitchen in addition to this guy. That’s a problem they’ll have to deal with, but it doesn’t concern us right now, except to say that as far as we can tell, Steven Kollman didn’t exist in Dove Point. He paid cash for the apartment and worked without identification. No one there knew him as Justin Manning. They knew him as Steven.”

  Janet’s face brightened a little. “Doesn’t that mean it’s likely-?”

  Stynes held up his hand. “It’s too early to conclude anything. It really is. We’re going to search the public records we have access to and see what if anything we can find out about Steven Kollman. In the meantime, we do know that someone-presumably this same guy-has been using your brother’s name and social security number for the past decade. He’s worked at a series of odd jobs all over the country-some in the South, some as close as Columbus and Cincinnati. He was never in any other trouble with the law, at least not anything that shows up as a conviction or an outstanding warrant beyond the one incident in Columbus. That’s the summons that Ashleigh found in his apartment. We’ve been in contact with local police departments in the places where he lived, hoping that they’ll do some legwork for us and ask about Justin Manning at some of the places he worked, but they’re strapped for time and resources, so who knows how long that will take to pan out, if it does at all.”

  “Can anything else be done?” Janet asked. “How are we going to find out what’s going on with this guy?”

  “What we can do is send this photo out,” Stynes said. “Send it to law enforcement agencies, the media. With the Internet, we can hit all corners of the country. We can hope someone recognizes him and knows something about him. Otherwise, the clock is ticking, and eventually we’ll have to let him go.”

  “Let him go?” Ashleigh said.

  Stynes looked over at the girl. She hadn’t said much since he’d come in the door, so her voice sounded discordant. She wasn’t content to just let her mother ask the tough questions.

  “That’s the law,” Stynes said. “We can’t just hold someone as long as we want.”

  “But he’s using my uncle’s social security number. Isn’t that identity theft or something?”

  “It is,” Stynes said. “If he’s really not your uncle. Do you have any proof that he isn’t who he says he is?”

  Again, the room fell silent. Stynes understood where Ashleigh was coming from-he felt the exact same way. At some point, he no longer cared what the answer was-yes, this man in the jail was Justin Manning or, no, the man in the jail wasn’t Justin Manning-he just wanted a final answer.

  But their options for answering that question were limited.

  “Look,” Stynes said. “I know how frustrating this is. I get it. If that man in the jail is your brother, then we convicted the wrong man twenty-five years ago. And that’s on me. Big-time. And if he’s not your brother, then I want to see him punished for harassing you.”

  “He never told me he was Justin,” Janet said. “Never.”

  “He still pretended to be Justin to some extent,” Stynes said. “People do that. They use the identities of deceased children because they know there isn’t much of a paper trail on a child. No arrests, no work history. It’s easy to acquire that information through a public record search and then get false identification made. He broke the law by doing that.” Stynes thought about it and chose the right words. “He raised your hopes. He led you on. That’s wrong.”

  “So what are our options here, besides just waiting around?” Janet asked.

  “Do you mean what options do we have for proving that man’s relationship or lack of one to you?” Stynes asked. “Absent a witness who will swear to something, which I don’t think we h
ave, there’s only DNA or fingerprinting. Your brother didn’t have any prominent scars or anything like that, did he?”

  Janet shook her head.

  “So take a DNA sample,” Ashleigh said.

  “From the man in the jail?” Stynes asked.

  “Yes. Compare it to Mom. Then you’d know.”

  “We already asked him to do that, and he didn’t respond,” Stynes said. “And we can’t just force him to do it. It’s invasive. We’d have to have a court order, and in a case like this, I don’t know if a judge would grant it. They tend to do that with sexual assault and murder cases, but with this-” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Can’t you just get him to lick an envelope or something?” Ashleigh asked. “Or steal his gum?”

  “This isn’t TV,” Stynes said.

  “What would it take to get a DNA sample from the body in Justin’s grave?” Janet asked.

  “You’d still need a court order, but there wouldn’t be any obstacles to getting it because the family would be making the request. But the judge would have to weigh the cost and time against the potential value that would come out of it. It might be a tough sell. And if I can be perfectly frank, we wouldn’t even know how much viable DNA they could get off the body. Remember, he was buried in those woods for a number of weeks. The body was skeletonized when we found it. And there was no embalming, no preservation possible. After another twenty-five years in the ground, who knows?”

  “But it’s possible?” Janet asked.

  “It is possible. They can do great things these days. They may be able to recover some tissue or even something from the bone marrow or the teeth. Then they’d take a cheek swab from you and compare. But you still have to get a judge to agree to have the city take on the cost in a case in which there is no abundantly clear evidence to justify the exhumation.”

  Janet and Ashleigh exchanged a look. They knew something.

  “What?” Stynes asked.

  “Did you get my phone message today?” Janet asked.

  “I did, but I didn’t have time to call back.”

  “Did you hear what the message said?” she asked.

  “You said something about a donation and a burial,” he said.

  Janet told him, and as she spoke, the words from the message came back to Stynes again. And then he understood the look exchanged between Janet and Ashleigh. They had the money to exhume and rebury the body. Acquiring the court order would be easier than he thought.

  They could finally find out who was buried in that grave, if it was Justin or someone else.

  “Okay,” Stynes said. “It should take a couple of days to get the ball rolling. The next big thing for you, Janet, is that they’ll take a sample from your cheek. It’s quick and painless.”

  “Detective?”

  Stynes looked up. So did Janet and Ashleigh. Behind them, in the doorway that led back to the bedrooms, stood Bill Manning. Stynes wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing there. He must have walked up silently, but he acted as though he had heard a fair amount of the conversation.

  “I’d like to give a sample for this test,” Bill said.

  “Dad, it’s not-”

  “Actually, it might help,” Stynes said. “If the sample in the ground is degraded, having another point of reference would help. Are you sure you want to do that, Mr. Manning?”

  “I said I did.”

  “Then I’ll include that in the request,” Stynes said, but he said those words to Bill Manning’s back. He had already turned back down the hallway.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Late that night, after Detective Stynes had left the house promising to call and keep Janet up-to-date as things progressed, and after Ashleigh went upstairs to bed, Janet knocked on her father’s bedroom door.

  She knew he’d be awake. The TV still droned behind the closed door, and she had noticed over the previous six months or so that he was staying up later than ever before. He used to be an early-to-bed, early-to-rise type, bragging about being able to wake up at five thirty on the dot every day without the help of an alarm clock. But unemployment had shifted his living patterns, and even after eleven Janet knew she could likely catch him still awake, staring at a baseball game or news show.

  “Dad?” she said.

  “Come in,” he said from the other side of the door.

  Janet didn’t think she’d heard him correctly. He always opened the door and then treated his room like a private sanctuary, a boundary territory not to be crossed by anyone. She’d grown used to talking to him in the doorway, a far cry from the moments of her childhood when she could climb into bed with her mother in the morning. Her dad would be gone to work, and Janet would sneak in and lie next to her mother, feel her warmth and affection.

  Inside the room, her dad lay across the bed, the covers thrown back. He wore a white T-shirt and a striped pair of boxer shorts. Without a regular shirt on, Janet saw that he had gained some weight in the preceding months. His belly bulged against the cotton fabric of the T-shirt more than she would have expected.

  He’s also getting older, she reminded herself. Even he has to get older.

  He didn’t mute the volume on the TV or turn to face her. Janet looked at the screen. In black and white Humphrey Bogart and a band of American soldiers stormed their way across the desert.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt.”

  “Are you going out?” he asked.

  “No, it’s too late for that.”

  “Well, the other night…” He left the thought unfinished.

  The room filled with the sound of tank and artillery fire. “Dad? Can you turn that down a little?”

  He frowned but thumbed the volume control. He still didn’t look at her.

  “Dad, I just wanted to know why you volunteered to give that sample tonight. You’ve acted so cold about everything else. It seemed out of the blue.”

  He kept his eyes directed to the TV screen. He looked like he was planning on ignoring Janet and hoping she’d go away. But she wouldn’t go away, and before she’d said anything else, he said, “Won’t that put the questions to rest?”

  “Some of them. Maybe all of them. It depends on what they find.”

  “And will that make you happy?” he asked.

  Janet thought about her answer to that question. She answered truthfully. “I’m not sure, Dad,” she said. “I’m just not sure.”

  “Neither am I,” he said. “But I think it’s time we tried to do something, isn’t it?”

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Janet wished she could escape from the news, from Dove Point. From everything.

  The days waiting for the DNA results to come back from the state crime lab were agony-and they were made worse because everyone in town and throughout the region knew about the arrest of a man who might be Justin Manning. Detective Stynes had released his mug shot to the news media and held a press conference on a Friday morning, explaining the developments in the case. Not only did he speak about the arrest of the man claiming to be Justin Manning, but he also revealed that a DNA test was under way to determine the identity of the body in Justin’s grave. He said that the family had decided to relocate Justin’s body to the plot next to his mother, not mentioning the anonymous donor.

  Janet chose not to attend the press conference. Stynes placed no pressure on her to be there, and rather than subject herself to questions and photographs, she stayed away and read a story about it-written by none other than Kate Grossman-on the Internet.

  But staying away from the press conference didn’t matter. In the days after the story went public, reporters began to call the Manning house several times a day. Kate Grossman sent Janet a bouquet of flowers and a request for an interview. Janet crumpled the note and threw it away. Then Janet came in to work three days after the press conference to find Madeline waiting for her with a piece of paper in her hand. An Internet news service had picked up the story. But they didn’t place it under national news or crime n
ews. They filed it under “News of the Weird.”

  “Jesus, Madeline.”

  “I know. It’s awful.”

  “They’re making this look like it’s some kind of sideshow,” Janet said. “My life-my family-has become a sideshow.”

  “I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have shown you that.”

  Janet sat in her desk chair, her shoulders slumped. She felt tired more than anything else. She hadn’t been able to sleep in anticipation of the test results. And just being at home meant a ringing phone-and Janet answered every call, thinking it might be news from Detective Stynes when in reality the calls were only media requests or the occasional crank caller.

  “No, it’s good that you did,” Janet said. “I should be prepared for more calls.” Janet looked at the piece of paper again. “People in offices all over America are going to be sending this story to each other. They’re going to say, ‘Hey, look at this crazy shit.’ ”

  “On the bright side, at least the word will get out.”

  Janet wanted to laugh at Madeline’s insane attempt to see the silver lining, but she didn’t have the energy.

  “Why don’t you take some personal time?” Madeline said. “Hell, you and Ashleigh could take a drive somewhere.”

  “Where? Everybody has seen the story.”

  “Oh, they don’t know who you are. When’s the last time you took a day off? By the time you come back-”

  “Thanks, Madeline. But I wouldn’t be able to think about anything else. I might as well stay here and try to live a normal life. Not that that’s possible.” Janet stood up. “I just wish…”

  “What?”

  “I wish Ashleigh didn’t have to get dragged through all of this. I feel like our weird family has put her right in the middle of something.”